ScotGovCamp #scotgc13

OKFN Meetup #6

Thursday 16th of May was the 6th Open Knowledge Foundation meetup in
Edinburgh. We had a great room in Techcube, more speakers than usual and
loads of attendees. Here's an account.

Bill RobertsBill, founder of Swirrl ("the linked data company") talked about tools and user interfaces they are developing to make handling data easier for communities; particularly for the less technical. They've encountered a spectrum of users with different levels of technical abilities and needs, so they have to account for this in the tools they build. Technical complexity for accessing data ranges from SPARQL endpoints, JSON APIs, downloadable spreadsheets to visualisations, maps and charts.

They're focussing on providing the data in accessible ways rather than
building visualisations though. They'd struggle to meet or even understand
everyone's needs; instead, it's important to concentrate in empowering the
communities to use the data themselves.

Kim TaylorAn undergraduate Informatics student and participant of the Smart Data Hack, Kim showed us placED, the project her team had worked on, and are continuing to develop.

This is a place finder for people who are looking to maintain or improve their
personal wellbeing. They used datasets from the City of Edinburgh Council
(and presumably ALISS?) to create an Android app. They stored their data in a
Google AppEngine datastore, but I'm not sure if it has a web frontend as well.

Some of the problems they encountered include copyright issues with ordnance
survey place data, and royal mail postcode data, which made up part of the
Council's data but wasn't available for anyone to use due to licensing
restrictions. They worked around this by recomputing location data from the
parts of addresses the did have access to with Google's geocoding API.

When they open their database up for user input, which they inevitably will if
they want their app to stay current and useful, they'll have to think about
how to maintain the content.

Gavin CrosbyGavin works for the Council, with a title I've forgotten, but it's to do with youth work. Youth work has a very specific definition to do with people aged between 11 and 25, meeting in organised groups with a volunteering adult present. There's loads of this going on in Edinburgh, organised by Scouts/Guides, schools, churches or maybe even self-organised. There's no central database about what is going on where, which is one of the Council's biggest issues in this area. Word of mouth is usually how this kind of information is spread amongst young people, and Gavin suggested that a lot of youths may be unwilling to attend something they'd heard about without a direct invitation from someone they know.

In an attempt to reign some of this information in, they've created the Youth
Work Map.

It's not an ideal system, as they have to update it manually when a youth
group or activity organiser decide to inform the Council that they exist. Not
everybody opts in, so there is data missing. Manual updating also means the
map is not 'live'; things might go out of date and not be removed straight
away.

Gavin said it is the constraints of the Council's web system that has caused a
lot of the problems, and points out that they haven't considered accessibility
issues (for example, access for people with vision problems), and it's not
interactive. He'd love to see the ability for kids to chat to each other
through the map, or leave reviews for particular events. There are issues
with child protection here, of course.

He would also like to see better tagging and organisation of the content on
the map, links to other data repositories (there are parallel similar
projects), and the ability to connect events to areas or routes rather than
single points.

Gavin pointed out that a lot of the audience for this map is likely to be
adults looking for youth projects, rather than young people themselves.

Leah LockhartLeah made a quick announcement about the new Local Government Open Data Working Group. They're organising open data surgeries (similar to her social media surgeries that you've definitely heard of by now if you're floating around the OD scene in Edinburgh). They're also hoping to fill in the OKFN Open Data Census for Scotland, and meet regularly in the pub.

Fiona works in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and she told us
about Open Data in climate change science, or the lack thereof. A team she
has put together have got some funding to carry out a small investigation
about Open Data use in climate change science, and to try to build a network
around this. They'll be looking at trends and patterns of the past decade to
see if research has been any more successful when existing datasets were used,
or if papers are more well-cited when they make their data open at the end of
it (for example).

She thinks the lack of Open Data in this area could be due to the expensive
nature of making data good enough quality to share, and of course the fact
that when people have worked hard to gather data they feel that they own it;
why should they share?

They're hoping that their report might go some way to persuading funding
bodies to have sharing of data as a criteria for applications.

John said, brilliantly, that talking about information visualisation usually
means graphs. But normal people "don't think in graphs".

He works in community education, and a couple of years ago he started working
in "volumetric and comparative" visualisations, which can be much more useful
and empowering to people. He showed us a visualisation of one trillion
dollars (which I can't find a link to, so let me know if anyone has one).

He's not had much support with creating tools and visualisations, because he's
not interested in making money from it, so it's hard to attract funding. What
he's doing looks really useful though, so hopefully we'll see more!

Ben JefferyBen is another undergraduate Informatics student who took part in the Smart Data Hack and whose team is still working on the project they started at the hack. They're re-imagining the University's student information portal by pulling in lots of different data sources, and presenting the information more sensibly. They've been doing a fantastic job, but of course are all busy with exams and general learning, so the haven't been able to spend as much time on this as they'd like.

They're also struggling to get raw data out of the University, and point to
(my alma mater) the University of Lincoln's open data
portal as an example of what could and should be
done about this. So they're turning their project into a pilot to demonstrate
what they could do if they had the data they wanted. They're also conscious
of similar-but-different projects, like projects.ed.ac.uk, and don't want to
duplicate effort.

Ben said they've found that a lot of the University of Edinburgh's data is
held by middleware vendors, so it's particularly hard to access. But this is
information that is funded by students, so it should be available to them! He
said the "University should be a breeding ground for knowledge" so data
shouldn't be silo'd up.

He also said that there are a lot of politics in the way with this sort of
thing. They, as any level-headed software developer, just want to build
stuff. They're still in various talks though, so this is a space to watch...

Susan Pettie and Marc HorneThese guys are from So Say Scotland and aim to change culture to make Scotland better. Open Data is important for democratic movements, so they told us about some of their events. They're building a network of activists and campaigners, and hold large scale assemblies themed around 'thinking together', which is a kind of en masse guided brainstorming. They're trying to spark a movement, and are aiming for 25,000 people. They're investigating ways to make their assemblies more efficient, as currently collating all of the ideas that are generated is a manual process. This would be nigh on impossible when they reach their participation goal.

There will be a report about their progress on the 27th of May.

Devon WalsheDevon was our Techcube host, and he told us about Sync Geeks, Geeks in Residence. This is a program funded by Creative Scotland that puts the technologically minded into arts organisations. Previous efforts by arts organisations to employ 'geeks' to solve a technical problem or produce a digital solution for something have been problematic due to the 'black box' approach. The developers produce an outcome, get paid and leave, often aiming to do the minimum amount of work. Geeks in Residence promotes developers and the organisations working together more closely, to allow for sustainable solutions.

Part of the project is to analyse the relationships of people who know about
technology, and those who don't, with each other.

In my notes I've scribbled "convert fear into technology", and I can't
remember what that originated from, but it sounds awesome.

Devon did some work with Stills photography centre.
Nobody knew what they needed, so after some collaboration they developed an
interactive floor plan (because the Stills building is way confusing) and some
kind of interactive timeline because Stills has an interesting history.

He also plugged the Culture Hack Scotland in Glasgow in July (12th-
14th), which I'm terribly disappointed I won't be in the country for.

Next OKFN meetupWill be on the 22nd of August, in Informatics. Here's a link to the Meetup so you can RSVP. I'll sure be there, if I'm not somewhere else.. (depends if/when/where my Mum books an obligatory family holiday).

Starting up in IT panel discussion

I had an amazing evening at the Starting up in IT panel discussion, followed
by Innis & Gunn beer tasting on Thursday evening. It was held in the shiny
MMS Quartermile One offices. (When I'm rich, I want a flat on
Quartermile. A turret-y one, not a glass one. Or
maybe both).

I felt chronically under-dressed when I arrived - a majority were suited - but
everyone was really friendly and forthcoming with advice.

Anyway, speaking of being rich. There were lots of interesting business-wise
people to talk to at this event, including CEO of Skyscanner Gareth Williams,
and Craig Anderson of Pentech Ventures. Plus lawyers specialising in things
like IP, employment, company formation, from MMS. The panel discussion was
enlightening; I'll go through some highlights raw notes...

Funding

Skyscanner - 2 mil from Scottish Equity Partners 2007.

Getting funding isn't a goal or validation.

Best way to get funding is not to need it.

Scottish Enterprise: match funding.

Give as much as you get. Confide in investor.

Getting wise

Don't pitch too early. Build traction first.

Prove potential marketshare one way or another.

Preparing business plan is productive. Converting to a vision to a plan when you get funding.

Subscribe to investment bloggers.

Networkiiiing. Find someone to champion you to an investor.

Gareth: As many people are delusional as have a key insight. How to know which you are yourself?

I heard about some really interesting ventures, too, like Identity
Artworks which looks like they're making
a _huge _difference to young people, and have really inspiring stories to
tell. Plus ShareIn, soon launching an equity
crowdfunding platform. Veeerrry interesting...

The panel was followed by beer tasting hosted by Innis & Gunn. I don't drink,
but I would have sipped along to be sociable. However, it turned out the beer
wasn't vegetarian (filtered through
isinglass). This, at least, meant
more for everyone else on my table. MMS had come up with a written seating
plan, by the way, that separated people who had arrived together. Forced
networking! Excellent.

This served as great chance for Steve and I to independently practice our
GeoLit elevator pitching, and I think we'd got it down to perfection by the
end of the evening. Extremely encouragingly, we were consistently met with
enthusiasm and responses like "that's an amazing idea!". We left pretty
buzzing.

[Notes] How to write a literature review workshop

Just notes!

Workshop by Dr Mimo Caenepeel on Monday 22nd April.

'Critical' does not mean you have to pass judgement, or say why it's good or
bad.
Not taking things at face value.

Started with freewriting about what has particularly influenced / inspired our
own research. Five minutes, not allowed to stop or edit, don't worry about
quality of writing, not for anyone else to read. A good way to get ideas out
of your head and start to organise your thoughts without censoring or
constraining yourself.

How many pages will a review usually take up in a thesis? My policy is to
write what needs to be written and stop when you're done. But apparently 20
to 30, sometimes more, is normal in sciences.

There's no consistent / right answer to 'how many publications to review'.
For some people it's in the tens, for some the hundreds.

Think about how to integrate literature review into the thesis. You're
unlikely to have a chapter that is just 'literature review' and no mention of
the background reading elsewhere.

A review can often be considered as an indicator of the quality of the rest of
the research - demonstrating scholarship.

A good place to start:
1\\\\. Write your research question, formulated as a question.
2\\\\. Write up to five research areas that are relevant to your research
question.
3\\\\. Note some related issues/areas that will not be considered in your review.

Think about balance of content.
1\\\\. Three studies influential in your field (I couldn't answer this, I clearly
need to read more).
2\\\\. Two significan older contributions.
3\\\\. Five recent sources.
4\\\\. Two sources that have strongly influenced your thinking.

You don't need to consider all papers in the same level of detail. Decide
which papers are more important / useful than others.

For some papers (important ones) you should work through these questions in
the same way every time you read something (this is 'SQ3R'):
1\\\\. Survey: What is the gist of the article? Skim the title, abstract,
introduction, conclusion and section headings. What stands out?
2\\\\. Question: Which aspects of the research are particularly relevant for your
review? Articulate some relevant questions the article might address.
3\\\\. Read: Read through the text more slowly and in more detail and highlight
key points / key words. Identify connections with other material you have
read.
4\\\\. Recall: Divide the text into manageable chunks and summarise each chunk in
a sentence.
5\\\\. Review: To what extent has the text answered the questions you formulated
earlier?

Critical reading (these seem like really useful questions to work through
whilst reading papers):
1\\\\. What is the author's central argument or main point, ie. what does the
author want you, the reader, to accept?
2\\\\. What conclusions does the author reach?
3\\\\. What evidence does the author put foward in support of his or her
conclusions?
4\\\\. Do you think the evidence is strong enough to support the arguments and
conclusions, ie. is the evidence relevant and far-reaching enough?
5\\\\. Does the author make any unstated assumptions about shared beliefs with
readers?
6\\\\. Can these assumptions be challenged?
7\\\\. Could the text's scientific, cultural or historical context have an effect
on the author's assumptions, the content and the way it has been presented?

[Notes] 'How to write a thesis' workshop

Just notes from a three-hour workshop about how to write an Informatics
thesis, on the 16th of April.

State contributions (to knowledge) explicitly. Intro, conclusions; each
chapter should have some (probably not all) contributions discussed. Be
obvious; use headings.

Knowledge - background:

justify choices

explain methods

acknowledge alternatives

evaluate

Evidence, well-reasoned arguments, acknowledge limitations.

Clear openings for future work. Be clear where they are.

Make it reproduceable.

Short / concise. Examiners like short theses.

Introduce what's interesting and important.

When outline thesis, look at structure of main argument, not of document.

Background material must have point. Only include as much detail as you need
to make point.
Points, eg:

Explain method you use.

Novelty of your approach. Similarities with existing work.

Justify choices (evaluate other work).

Don't tear down others' work. 'Build on'.

Cite examiners, they've probably published something relevant.. (but not for the sake of it).

Then we had five minutes to write down what our PhDs are about and what we
have already found out. I wrote:

How do the futures of the Semantic Web and amateur digital content creation
fit together?Can Semantic Web tools and technologies be used to enhance collaborative
creative partnerships and encourage fruitful outputs?
_There are knowledge sharing systems and collaborative tools for scientific
fields and in education, but nothing for creative artsy things.

Attitudes towards data sharing and privacy amongst content creators are in
flux. There are lots of projects and energy around open data and
decentralised social networks that allow data to become portable and not tied
to one platform. One of TBL's visions for the Semantic Web is the dissolution
of data silos and 'walled' applications that disadvantage the user, and as
such the promotion of the 'ownership' of a user's data by the user themselves,
rather than the software or organisation that uses the data.

__There are lots of reasons people make content. There are lots of reasons
people don't make content (who could / would like to)._

Don't assume appendices will be read. More for extra info if needed by people
trying to reproduce your work (not your examiners).

Too many direct quotes look like you don't understand and are avoiding
explaining yourself.

Keep copies of web resources and cite access dates in case they change /
disappear.
Figures might be copyright if you just copy them from papers, even if you cite
them. Remake them, and put 'adapted from' as citation.

Examiners?

Depends on your supervisor. Discuss. Student might be able to suggest someone to examine.

Maybe a balance between internal and external knowledge.

Won't be someone junior, even if they're considered an expert in the field.

Helpful if supervisor knows how that person will behave in viva. Might be a good reason to avoid someone you think would be perfect from their background.

Conflict of interest regulations. You can know them personally though. External can't have been affiliated with UoE in the last three years, or substantially involved in your research (like co-authoring a paper). No ex-supervisors, from any university.

No grading system (ie no different levels of passed PhD). Might be external
prizes if you want extra recognition.

2nd UK Ontology Networks Workshop

The UK Ontology Networks Workshop took place over one day in the Informatics
Forum.

There was a mix of people there; some talks were way over my head and very
technical, and some talks were by people who confessed they had had to look up
"ontology" that morning. And things in between.

Interaction of representation and reasoning.
Changing world so agents must evolve. How to automate? What would trigger a
need for change:
Inconsistency
Incompleteness
Inefficiency
how to diagnose which?
Interested in language and perception change.
Unsorted first order logic algorithm called Reformation. Based on standard
unification algorithm.
Allows blocking and unblocking unification.

Doing more with library metadata. Learnt from OKFN. Had to convince people in
charge.
Dublin core, didn't like; not specific enough. Instead RDF > OWL. "We know
best how to structure our data"

Hardest was convincing marketing people that there was no commercial value.
Metadata is advert to actual resource.

Enrico Motta

Traditionally top down approach. So now so many people interacting with
semantic structures, so should involve users.
Recognise there isn't a unique or best way of doing things.
Initial study included modeling task with binary relations.

Patterns that are more or less intuitive. 4D least, 3D+1 most.
N-ary most widely used by experts.

Relationship between reasoning power and intuitiveness of writing? More
creativity needed for simpler ones. (Not really sure what he's saying)

Content arrangement on BBC sport by tagging, automatic to free up editors to
write.
LD API so systems don't need to know about each other.
Growing from simple rdfxml to more complex ontology.
Can ask much more general and much more detailed questions about sport.

Geographical addressing.
Addressing and address geocoding is important and broad. Not always postal,
but this not addressed (punlol) in ontologies.
Different contexts change meaning of address (for delivering, you only care
about postbox; property sale whole building).
Loads of things to address. Loads of reasons why.
Work held up as national address file is owned by royal mail and might be
sold!

Fiona McNeill

Run time extraction of data. Failure driven. Looking at extraction of specific
information.
Emergency response. Lots of data, timely sharing of data required.
From domestic level to humanitarian disasters.
How can it be automated?
Multilayered incompatibility.
Format
Terminology
Structure
...

Richard Gunn

Towards an intelligent information industry.

Elena Simperl (Soton, sociam)

Crowdsourcing ontology engineering.

CSrc: Brabham 2008.

Distribute task into smaller atomic units.

Humans validating results that are automatically detected as not accurate.
What are the costs? What resources?

Games with a purpose. Like quizzes.
Micropayments or vouchers.
MTurk. CrowdFlower.
Paper about useage of microtask crowdsourcing. ISWC 2012.

Inspiring and empowering: The Lovelace Colloquium, Nottingham 2013

☑ Attending!

When?

Where?

In 2008 I was in my first year of university, and the second ever Lovelace
Colloquium was held in Leeds. I was encouraged to attend by Professor Cornelia
Boldyreff and then-PhD student, now-Dr, Beth Massey. Doing so may have changed
my life.

At my first Lovelace, I was introduced to the very concepts of conferences,
mentors and (importantly) networking. The event was, and has been ever since,
a forum for thought-provoking technical talks, inspiring motivational speeches
and stimulating discussions about technology-related disciplines, careers, and
womens' role within this world. To attend Lovelace is to be surrounded by
extraordinary and excited minds; undergraduates at the top of their game, and
successful academics and industry professionals to advise and mentor. Having
now been along as an attendee, a poster competition entrant and for the past
two years as a judge, the conference has provided perfect annual milestones to
mark my own academic progression and personal development. I have met so many
wonderful people and made so many important connections thanks to this event
that I genuinely think I would be in a different place today, perhaps as a
different person, had I never been. I can trace back directly or indirectly to
one or other Lovelace Colloquium many of the opportunities I have had to
develop academically (poster presenting, inspiring conversations),
professionally (networked my way to a Google internship) and personally
(overcoming low self-confidence, understanding imposter syndrome and
conquering public speaking).

This year's, hosted by the School of Computer Science at Nottingham
University, has been no different.

For the first time ever I arrived with time to spare before registration, and
got to know some of the other helpers and attendees. I was put in charge of
organising posters, directed towards a room containing lots of large fuzzy
blue boards, divided up the space based on the number expected in each
category (First Year, Second Year, Final Year, and taught Masters) and
cheerfully handed out drawing pins to entrants as they arrived.

At 10 the crowd who had gathered in a lecture theatre were welcomed by the
superhuman Dr Hannah Dee, and the first round of talks began.

Instantly relevant (to me), Natasha Alechina discussed work on logic in
ontologies. The use of logic can help with debugging when creating new
ontologies by detecting inconsistencies (eg. fallasies, contradictions) or
incoherance (eg. empty sets). The method they use is to compute a minimal set
from a big graph in which nodes are statements, and they keep track of where
all the statements are derived from. It was "surprisingly fast" when tested
with 1600 large random ontologies, compared to state of the art methods to
compute minimal sets.

Logic is also useful in ontology matching, for example Ordnance Survey
vocabularies versus Open Street Map. Logic helps the process by finding what
might need to be changed or removed, but human intervention is needed to make
the final call.

Next up, Jemma Chambers turned out to be a brilliant speaker and surely
inspired everyone in the room by telling us how she'd made the most of a
career in technology over the past decade. She was in her last week as a CISCO
business development manager, about to move to a similar role at Virgin Media.

She started with some statistics:

51% of gamers are girls, but only 6% of those who make games are female.

21% of jobs in technology overall are held by women.

Companies with women in their management report a 34% return on investment over companies with only males.

20% of C-level (CEO, CTO, CIO, etc) leaders worldswide are female.

(Disclaimer: I may have botched the context of those stats slightly, my notes
aren't very clear. But you get the idea. Also she didn't say where these stats
are from).

Jemma did a year-in-industry during her degree, programming for Oracle. She
was bored out of her mind coding (I'm sure some people in the audience
sympathised, but probably a minority) and thus learnt what job she didn't
want to do when she graduated. Instead, she joined an accounts management
graduate program at CISCO, had some doubts but stuck it out, rocked hard in
sales and climbed the ladder through hard work and force of will, despite
various sexist or ageist behaviour directed her way. A key point here is
whatever you end up doing, do it well; being successful wherever you end up
opens doors to what you really want to do, if you're not already there.
Especially in the big tech companies like CISCO, where moving between jobs
internally is facilitated and even encouraged.

On a related note, Jemma talked a bit about the flexibility of CISCO (and
other similar companies). Working hours, for example, are yours to choose so
long as you get the job done. Similarly she's had no problem negotiating
maternity leave, and eighteen months after the birth of her son she's working
three days a week (and still feels guilty about dropping him with the
babysitter).

Naturally she mentioned a few (legitimate) generalisations about women in the
workplace (nothing I haven't heard before, but this is my fifth Lovelace)
and followed them up with some solid advice. Women seem to attribute success
to outside forces like luck, or kindness of others, where men attribute
success to themselves. It's much easier to move forward if you remind yourself
that you worked hard for this and deserve it.

Successful men are more likely to be percieved as likeable than successful
women, who are often construed as bitches. Ignore what other people think, and
don't let yourself get walked on to try and make friends. At the same time,
don't let this stereotype go to your head; remember to support other women in
the workplace rather than being competitive.

Women and men have different leadership styles (generally) as well as other
strengths and weaknesses of their own, and it's a combination of the two that
really make a successful team, not more of one than the other.

Jemma recommends reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.

She also discussed the various merits of networking (of which I am happy to
attest there are many!) and how to source mentors in the tech community.

This talk was a fantastic one to start the day with, especially to prompt any
in the audience who might otherwise have not done so, to talk to everybody.
Jemma's enthusiastic speaking style will have kept everyone engaged, too, even
those still waking up.

Dr Julie Greensmith filled us in on her journey from a pharmacy undergraduate through to her current work on artificial immune systems. These are algorithms inspired by human immune systems; robust, decentralized, adaptive and tolerant. They work by knowing what is normal instead of what isn't, which is particularly useful if you don't know what attack is going to come next. Their early work, though excellent, was based on a rudimentary computer scientist understanding of how immune systems work; these days they have a more interdisciplinary team with biologists to improve things even further.

Gillian Arnold, who is exceptionally well known and officially recognised as An Inspiring Woman, was filling in for a speaker who couldn't make it. She talked through the best career moments of various people she knew, which ranged from getting software into the hands of the public to promotions and financial incentives. She also talked through a few of the stereotypical problems women have in the a male-dominated workplace, but most of what she could have said had been covered by Jemma. A pro tip for getting attention at meetings if you're being talked over is to bang the table.

Dr Hannah Dee gave us a technical talk about her current research, as well as a little background on how she got where she is. She is much happier as a lecturer as opposed to a post doc, as she gets to direct her own research areas, and isn't constrained within fields she's not totally comfortable (like surveillance). So now she's interested in time and change in nature, doing things like laser scanning and time lapsing plants to find out new things that are particularly hard to find out. Some really interesting stuff about camera hacking with the Canon development kit, which lets you write programs in Lua or BASIC, and provides the sorts of menu options you'd usually only find on a really expensive camera.

Milena Nikolic is an engineer at Google London who has worked on Google's mobile sites, integrating results from mobile app stores into search results and the Android Market / Play Store. She says she has undergone a "journey of scale", and loves shipping projects that make a real difference and are used by real people. She answered lots of questions about working at Google. As with Jemma's experience at CISCO, hours are flexible at Google, and there are no strict iterative phases for development, but projects have their own cycles. She doesn't spend as much time coding as she'd like, but this varies depending on the stage a project is in, too.

Then someone asked "why are girls scared of coding?" and a lively discussion
ensued. For some reason I didn't take notes, but things I can remember that
were suggested include:

Girls are more hesitant about diving in, or scared of breaking things. To progress with programming, you've gotta just keep trying and failing.

Girls are more emotionally affected if their code does fail. Guys just shrug it off and try something out. (I personally have never felt like this).

Girls are less likely to be exposed to programming or programming-like activities at an early age, so by the time they come across computer science they may see it as boring, too mathsy or not creative. I suspect that had I not got interested in making websites aged ten, it might have passed me by during high school, and I would have ended up doing chemistry or French at university.

There were more; I'll add them if I remember.

In between these fantastic talks were coffee, lunch and networking breaks and
of course, poster judging. I teamed up with Milena Radenkovic to assess the
second years, and after three quarters of an hour of lunch, plus a 'last
minute' extra half-hour before the decision had to be made (thus I missed the
panel discussion), we had narrowed it down to five... It was hard.
Seriously. We discussed the poster content, presentation, practicality of the
ideas, whether the student was showing a project they were personally involved
with or intending to do (this holds weight with me) and how well the student
explained their ideas in person. They were all brilliant on all counts. We
negotiated splitting the second place prize in two, but still had to choose
three out of our final five.

Eventually we settled on Carys Williams (quantum cryptography; University of
Bath) for the first prize, and Heidi Howard (routers that pay their way;
University of Cambridge) and Jo Dowdall (smart tickets; University of Dundee)
for joint second place.

I only wish I'd had time to look at the rest of the posters!

I finished off the day by joining other attendees for dinner, which was all
round brilliant, and resulted in a late night.

RSVP

Inspiring and empowering: The Lovelace Colloquium, Nottingham 2013

In 2008 I was in my first year of university, and the second ever Lovelace
Colloquium was held in Leeds. I was encouraged to attend by Professor Cornelia
Boldyreff and then-PhD student, now-Dr, Beth Massey. Doing so may have changed
my life.

At my first Lovelace, I was introduced to the very concepts of conferences,
mentors and (importantly) networking. The event was, and has been ever since,
a forum for thought-provoking technical talks, inspiring motivational speeches
and stimulating discussions about technology-related disciplines, careers, and
womens' role within this world. To attend Lovelace is to be surrounded by
extraordinary and excited minds; undergraduates at the top of their game, and
successful academics and industry professionals to advise and mentor. Having
now been along as an attendee, a poster competition entrant and for the past
two years as a judge, the conference has provided perfect annual milestones to
mark my own academic progression and personal development. I have met so many
wonderful people and made so many important connections thanks to this event
that I genuinely think I would be in a different place today, perhaps as a
different person, had I never been. I can trace back directly or indirectly to
one or other Lovelace Colloquium many of the opportunities I have had to
develop academically (poster presenting, inspiring conversations),
professionally (networked my way to a Google internship) and personally
(overcoming low self-confidence, understanding imposter syndrome and
conquering public speaking).

This year's, hosted by the School of Computer Science at Nottingham
University, has been no different.

For the first time ever I arrived with time to spare before registration, and
got to know some of the other helpers and attendees. I was put in charge of
organising posters, directed towards a room containing lots of large fuzzy
blue boards, divided up the space based on the number expected in each
category (First Year, Second Year, Final Year, and taught Masters) and
cheerfully handed out drawing pins to entrants as they arrived.

At 10 the crowd who had gathered in a lecture theatre were welcomed by the
superhuman Dr Hannah Dee, and the first round of talks began.

Instantly relevant (to me), Natasha Alechina discussed work on logic in
ontologies. The use of logic can help with debugging when creating new
ontologies by detecting inconsistencies (eg. fallasies, contradictions) or
incoherance (eg. empty sets). The method they use is to compute a minimal set
from a big graph in which nodes are statements, and they keep track of where
all the statements are derived from. It was "surprisingly fast" when tested
with 1600 large random ontologies, compared to state of the art methods to
compute minimal sets.

Logic is also useful in ontology matching, for example Ordnance Survey
vocabularies versus Open Street Map. Logic helps the process by finding what
might need to be changed or removed, but human intervention is needed to make
the final call.

Next up, Jemma Chambers turned out to be a brilliant speaker and surely
inspired everyone in the room by telling us how she'd made the most of a
career in technology over the past decade. She was in her last week as a CISCO
business development manager, about to move to a similar role at Virgin Media.

She started with some statistics:

51% of gamers are girls, but only 6% of those who make games are female.

21% of jobs in technology overall are held by women.

Companies with women in their management report a 34% return on investment over companies with only males.

20% of C-level (CEO, CTO, CIO, etc) leaders worldswide are female.

(Disclaimer: I may have botched the context of those stats slightly, my notes
aren't very clear. But you get the idea. Also she didn't say where these stats
are from).

Jemma did a year-in-industry during her degree, programming for Oracle. She
was bored out of her mind coding (I'm sure some people in the audience
sympathised, but probably a minority) and thus learnt what job she didn't
want to do when she graduated. Instead, she joined an accounts management
graduate program at CISCO, had some doubts but stuck it out, rocked hard in
sales and climbed the ladder through hard work and force of will, despite
various sexist or ageist behaviour directed her way. A key point here is
whatever you end up doing, do it well; being successful wherever you end up
opens doors to what you really want to do, if you're not already there.
Especially in the big tech companies like CISCO, where moving between jobs
internally is facilitated and even encouraged.

On a related note, Jemma talked a bit about the flexibility of CISCO (and
other similar companies). Working hours, for example, are yours to choose so
long as you get the job done. Similarly she's had no problem negotiating
maternity leave, and eighteen months after the birth of her son she's working
three days a week (and still feels guilty about dropping him with the
babysitter).

Naturally she mentioned a few (legitimate) generalisations about women in the
workplace (nothing I haven't heard before, but this is my fifth Lovelace)
and followed them up with some solid advice. Women seem to attribute success
to outside forces like luck, or kindness of others, where men attribute
success to themselves. It's much easier to move forward if you remind yourself
that you worked hard for this and deserve it.

Successful men are more likely to be percieved as likeable than successful
women, who are often construed as bitches. Ignore what other people think, and
don't let yourself get walked on to try and make friends. At the same time,
don't let this stereotype go to your head; remember to support other women in
the workplace rather than being competitive.

Women and men have different leadership styles (generally) as well as other
strengths and weaknesses of their own, and it's a combination of the two that
really make a successful team, not more of one than the other.

Jemma recommends reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.

She also discussed the various merits of networking (of which I am happy to
attest there are many!) and how to source mentors in the tech community.

This talk was a fantastic one to start the day with, especially to prompt any
in the audience who might otherwise have not done so, to talk to everybody.
Jemma's enthusiastic speaking style will have kept everyone engaged, too, even
those still waking up.

Dr Julie Greensmith filled us in on her journey from a pharmacy undergraduate through to her current work on artificial immune systems. These are algorithms inspired by human immune systems; robust, decentralized, adaptive and tolerant. They work by knowing what is normal instead of what isn't, which is particularly useful if you don't know what attack is going to come next. Their early work, though excellent, was based on a rudimentary computer scientist understanding of how immune systems work; these days they have a more interdisciplinary team with biologists to improve things even further.

Gillian Arnold, who is exceptionally well known and officially recognised as An Inspiring Woman, was filling in for a speaker who couldn't make it. She talked through the best career moments of various people she knew, which ranged from getting software into the hands of the public to promotions and financial incentives. She also talked through a few of the stereotypical problems women have in the a male-dominated workplace, but most of what she could have said had been covered by Jemma. A pro tip for getting attention at meetings if you're being talked over is to bang the table.

Dr Hannah Dee gave us a technical talk about her current research, as well as a little background on how she got where she is. She is much happier as a lecturer as opposed to a post doc, as she gets to direct her own research areas, and isn't constrained within fields she's not totally comfortable (like surveillance). So now she's interested in time and change in nature, doing things like laser scanning and time lapsing plants to find out new things that are particularly hard to find out. Some really interesting stuff about camera hacking with the Canon development kit, which lets you write programs in Lua or BASIC, and provides the sorts of menu options you'd usually only find on a really expensive camera.

Milena Nikolic is an engineer at Google London who has worked on Google's mobile sites, integrating results from mobile app stores into search results and the Android Market / Play Store. She says she has undergone a "journey of scale", and loves shipping projects that make a real difference and are used by real people. She answered lots of questions about working at Google. As with Jemma's experience at CISCO, hours are flexible at Google, and there are no strict iterative phases for development, but projects have their own cycles. She doesn't spend as much time coding as she'd like, but this varies depending on the stage a project is in, too.

Then someone asked "why are girls scared of coding?" and a lively discussion
ensued. For some reason I didn't take notes, but things I can remember that
were suggested include:

Girls are more hesitant about diving in, or scared of breaking things. To progress with programming, you've gotta just keep trying and failing.

Girls are more emotionally affected if their code does fail. Guys just shrug it off and try something out. (I personally have never felt like this).

Girls are less likely to be exposed to programming or programming-like activities at an early age, so by the time they come across computer science they may see it as boring, too mathsy or not creative. I suspect that had I not got interested in making websites aged ten, it might have passed me by during high school, and I would have ended up doing chemistry or French at university.

There were more; I'll add them if I remember.

In between these fantastic talks were coffee, lunch and networking breaks and
of course, poster judging. I teamed up with Milena Radenkovic to assess the
second years, and after three quarters of an hour of lunch, plus a 'last
minute' extra half-hour before the decision had to be made (thus I missed the
panel discussion), we had narrowed it down to five... It was hard.
Seriously. We discussed the poster content, presentation, practicality of the
ideas, whether the student was showing a project they were personally involved
with or intending to do (this holds weight with me) and how well the student
explained their ideas in person. They were all brilliant on all counts. We
negotiated splitting the second place prize in two, but still had to choose
three out of our final five.

Eventually we settled on Carys Williams (quantum cryptography; University of
Bath) for the first prize, and Heidi Howard (routers that pay their way;
University of Cambridge) and Jo Dowdall (smart tickets; University of Dundee)
for joint second place.

I only wish I'd had time to look at the rest of the posters!

I finished off the day by joining other attendees for dinner, which was all
round brilliant, and resulted in a late night.

Resonate new media festival

Resonate, held between the 21st and 23rd of March in
Belgrade, Serbia, is "...a platform for networking, information, knowledge
sharing and education. It brings together distinguished, world class artists
with an opportunity of participating in a forward-looking debate on the
position of technology in art and culture." (from the website).

Before I left, I suggested I might return with the following:

Information about creative processes for digital artworks.

Anything to do with open data or decentralized social networking movements.

Potential case studies or people to work with.

I largely failed on all three counts.

I was thrown from the outset by the apparent poor organisation of the event.
Not to mention a complete lack of free food. But the main problem was that
well over one thousand people had tickets, but on the first day the main
lecture room could hold a few hundred at best. Seating consisted of a handful
of sofas and armchairs and valuable floor space was occupied by altogether too
many stylish coffee tables. For everyone not lucky enough to be among the
first ten in the room it was aching backs and/or pins and needles all round.
This situation improved slightly after the first day, when two more tracks
opened in slightly bigger rooms, but there was still nowhere near enough
space. People were bursting out all doors, so switching tracks ever wasn't an
option. There were also several long delays or postponements. A few were
weather related, but too many (ie more than none) were organisational; lack of
projector in main room, etc.

That aside, I was aware that an event labelled 'festival' wasn't going to be
right at the conference end of the party<->conference scale, but I was
surprised at just how much party it was. A party with thousands of people,
where everybody knew someone else but me. This made it particularly difficult
to interact. You might expect the opposite. Indeed, I suspect that for most
people this was the perfect environment to make new friends, start
collaborations etc. I'm (usually) great at networking. I'm never great at
social situations involving large crowds, a bar and loud music. I tried. But I
couldn't catch anyone's eye, there was never a moment to start a conversation.
The most interaction I had over three days was being elbowed out of the way by
people who felt more entitled to see what was going on than me.

I might have fared better if...

...I had succeeded in getting a place at one of the workshops. Places were
very limited, but it was explained that all workshops were open for anyone to
listen in on even if you couldn't participate directly. Had I taken part in
one, it would have been a lot easier to talk to some specific people. I went
along to attempt to listen in, however, to find all of the workshops (twenty
or so) consisted of people grouped around tables, together in the same giant
hall. The actual participants were craning their necks, straining to hear
their workshop instructor over the general clamour of the event, so it was
impossible for bystanders to be involved at all. Plus, only a couple of the
workshops had (handwritten) signs indicating which they were, so there was
also no way of tracking down the ones I was particularly interested in.

...I had been to any of the performances or night club tours that started
about about 9pm each day and ran until the early hours of the morning. The
performances, as far as I could tell, were electronic music sets, held in
night clubs or similar venues. I don't do night clubs, and I was knackered
by 7pm anyway, so that was a no go. Having said that, it probably wouldn't
have been easier to meet new people over very loud music in a place where
everyone was getting drunk, so maybe I didn't miss out.

Now I've explained that, I will write a bit about the talks I did manage to
get in to, which were generally interesting and of good quality. (The
itinerary I sketched out for myself beforehand differed greatly from what I
actually achieved because of crowd/small room issues mentioned previously).

These aren't the only things I went to, but the only ones I took notes or
tweeted about.
**Marcin Ignac**, talking about Data Art, showed some really cool things he's done with Plask and WebGL, including 3D data visualisations, hacking with fonts, and realtime installations like a 3D visualisation of global energy market transactions. Plask and WebGL are capable of a lot, just in the browser. He also mentioned basil.js, which is "a library that brings scripting and automation into layout and makes computational and generative design possible from within InDesign" (cite) which looks useful for artists wanting to get into coding.

Mike Tucker ("Unity as a Tool for Non-Games") suggested that Unity fills the creative gap recently vacated by Flash. He started out as a Flash guy, but isn't sad or bitter about Flash's demise, and understands that it's time to move on. His current WIP is an app to explore an abstract visual and audio landscape using the device's gyroscope. The audio is 'physically' located in a virtual 3D world, and changes as you navigate around by moving the device in space.

Julia Laub told us about her Generative Design book, that she worked on as part of her thesis project. She defined (with a diagram) generative design as creating choices, then making choices, rather than controlling a visual output. She created a visualisation of Wikipedia pages that presents as a self-optimising network - as you interact with the diagram to expand the information you want to see, it rearranges itself for optimal viewing. Her book looks amazing, and getting my hands on a copy is on my things-to-do list.

Signal | Noise (oops, I didn't take down the names of the actual guys) ("Datatainment") talked about gamification of data collection. People like "digital navel gazing"; they derive satisfaction from their own data, and comparing themselves to others. They mentioned a "top secret" client project for which they're aiming to "quantify everything people do"... intriguing...

Lucas Werthin ("Design, Tech and Architecture for Large Scale Projection Mapping") showed us the ins and outs of an incredible project he'd worked on.. Described here (with videos).

The onedotzeroscreening was a
compilation of digital animation work from a number of artists. It was weird
and awesome, with some inspiring visuals and music I need to listen to more
(inspiring for writing fiction, not for the PhD unfortunately). Notes I wrote
during that suggested I need to listen to the music in Warsnare, and the one
with the giant Catzilla in.

Markus Heckmann and Barry Threw ("Building by Doing - Visually guided design in TouchDesigner") described another easy bridge for artists who want to code. I wrote down "TouchDesigner" in my notes during this talk, but I can't remember why now. Find out more here.

My favourite talk was by Ivan Poupyrev ("Computing Reality"). I tweeted
loads about it, but none of them got sent because the wifi and my phone
weren't playing nice or something. Fortunately I also made a ton of notes.

Ivan describes himself as an 'inventor'; he worked for Sony, and now works for
Walt Disney, and he is inventing the future. He has a great ethic and vision
for the world; all about "giving people tools to make the world the way they
want it to be." He envisions a decentralisation of production; large
corporations only want to make their part of the world interactive, not the
whole world. So ordinary people must have the technology to use, develop,
spread, build on.

In 1999, his team created an augmented reality toolkit, before it's time. In
2001, they developed a flexible display with is interacted with by bending it
and sliding fingers around the back of the screen. A huge amount of
interactions are possible just by bending and flexing in different ways. In
2004, Sony said "users will never accept a device with no buttons", and all
early touchscreen devices also had buttons because of this. He says the
iPhone was the "fall" of the button, proving everyone wrong. Last year (2012)
the Sony PS Vita has touchback interaction, and Samsung have released a
flexible display this year (2013) but "nobody cares".

Now, he says, everything has been invented already, the market is saturated
with new gadgets. He sees the future of the technology curve as embedded in
people and surroundings: "no question... that it's coming to your body ...
going to seep into the environment, disappear into the environment ...
seamlessly, invisibly, efficiently" and describes a reality that computes
itself, where "the computer doesn't have to exist at all."

Ivan was very expressive about not being any kind of "tree-hugger", but is
convinced that we don't need to "make more junk". So many resources have been
used, and the earth can't support another industrial revolution. Instead, he
wants to turn everything that already exists into interactive objects,
including humans, animals and plants. That may sound weird / scary / far-
futuristic but guess what... they've already done it.

Flipping interaction on its head, they're all about not changing the
environment, but changing you, or your perception of the environment.
Touchৼ/em> is used for 'virtual tactile perception'... they can create a charged
field around the human hand so that you feel things differently. The objects
themselves are passive, simple, unchanged. The person just has to be in
contact with the device that creates the field, which can be embedded in an
object you're already touching like clothing, a shoe or an umbrella. Then,
with no wires or weird contraptions, the person can touch some object (like a
teapot) and as the settings of the field are changed, so the texture of the
object appears changed.

With this technology they can also tell who is touching something, or which
part of your own body you are touching, because everything has a different
electronic resistance. An example they produced was a touchscreen drawing
application that changed the pen colour depending on who was drawing, with no
additional information than sensing the fingers on the screen.

Disney has the botannicus interacticus \\\\- an interactive plant. Electrodes
in the soil transform any plant into a multi-touch controller! Gestures
around the plant (à la theremin) or touching the plant in different ways, can
be mapped to things like sound. It's possible to have very high precision.
All plants are different, too! So the same tech applied to different plants
will cause different outcomes. Video.

There's an open source version of Touchৼ/em> for Arduino.

Ivan also played with 3D printing, and sees this as something that will become
hugely accessible to the extent that people will start to manufacture most
things themselves; or at least, pop down to their local corner shop to get
something printed from an existing design.

They've done some experiments with 3D printing transparent objects, and 'light
pipes' which direct colours and sizes of light precisely. They can create
interactive displays by projecting light from below or behind objects and
piping images onto them.

It's possible now to 3D print a broad variety of sensors.

These things result in interactive objects that respond to you, but all of the
electronics are outside of the object, so you can switch one object for
another one and have it work the same very easily.

Resulting thoughts and ideasI got a general feeling of disparity between 'art' and 'real-life', with strong suggestions that it doesn't matter if interactive, technology-powered art installations break, so long as people are compelled to play with them. That's something I absolutely loved and absolutely hated simultaneously during my MSc in the ECA last year, and still causes internal conflict. (Ie. I understand the value of play and experimentation, but I'm passionate about things being useful and empowering, and it's possible to do both, and it bothers me when people take the easy way out, slap the 'experimental art' label on it and move on to their next solid-outcome-less project).

Despite not actually talking to anyone about what I am doing and how it might
in some way link to what they do, I suspect digital artists like these kinds
of people might be good use cases for what I'm trying to make. They
collaborate, have varied processes. And are more likely than amateur
YouTubers to be interested in engaging with a new experimental technology.
They could, for example, be incentivised to record their processes and actions
over the course of a project, and be rewarded with visualisations of their
data, and comparisons with the data of others. (Actually making the
visualisations is out of my remit, but there will be someone who can..).

A thing I should do is analyse blogs, articles, reports, etc about creative
digital projects for the vocabulary about their processes. I thought about
this as one of the speakers was just describing step by step the process for
one project... but I wasn't listening properly; I only realised in time to
have this thought, too late to write it all down. But there will be loads of
documentation already out there that can be harvested.

I always think of my project as something that helps a lot toward connecting
with others for collaborating, but a large part can be finding other art/media
projects for inspiration. That kind of pitch would sell it to this kind of
audience, at least.

Computer Mediated Social Sense-Making

Whilst more technical than the Digital
Methods
conference I went to in December, the talks and panel sessions served to build
upon things I started to think about then. Namely, beginning to situate my
research interests amongst many concepts from the currently quite alien fields
of sociology and anthropology.

The talks were varied, and key themes that emerged were the collection/use of
data for social improvement (health and wellbeing, teaching and learning,
disaster recovery), and the importance of context in making collected data
genuinely useful. A notable challenge is that one piece of data might have a
thousand different contexts from the perspectives of a thousand different
human beings. So how to communicate these variations to software that
processes this data, and perhaps makes decisions using it?

Perhaps not to worry too much about that at all. Process things locally
instead of globally, using local contexts and understandings, but make sure
everything is annotated such that information can still be exchanged across
the whole network, and differences in understanding can be accounted for or
reasoned out if a need occurs.

For the record, I'm looking at how Semantic Web technologies could be used to
better connect human and machine in the context of amateur digital content
creation (movies, comics, music, art), including how semantically annotating
creative (often collaborative) processes as well as the end products of
these processes and the engagement of an audience with these products, could
improve the overall experience of creating content (along a number of
dimensions). A massive part of this will be creating tools that actually
collect the necessary data from users. Ultimately, these tools will need to
be invisible, ie. easily integrated into existing online routines, with no
effort required to use them for the non-technically minded so that a network
effect can take place.

Incentives for crowdsourcing came up during CMSSM, and someone pointed out
that by gamifying data collection for research projects, incentives become the
same as ones offered by gambling companies; something competitive and
potentially addictive. I think things like global systems of reputation and
trust are useful on a network where people are to share data about their own
work (or opinions of the work of others) and may be nurturing a desire for
popularity or exposure on the network (a network where the people are
central, because the data could not exist without them, but where the users
and the data are simultaneously co-dependant).

1st International Open Data Dialogue, Berlin, 5-6 December

The 1st International Open Data Dialogue in Berlin in December was broadly a
discussion about real-world applications of Open Data. Lots of practice, less
theory. Despite this (or perhaps because of this, now I think about it) it
wasn't as technical as I expected. Felix Sasaki [1] talked about some basic
technicalities of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, kind of the first things
you'd learn if you were studying it in a structured way, and I heard a lot of
people afterwards complaining that that had been too technical.

Importantly, there was a real message of getting things done at this event,
and plenty of evidence that a world built on Open Data is not an idealistic
pipe dream, but a reality right now. Challenges are being articulated, and
solutions are being created, and problems are being overcome.

I stress this particularly because a couple of sceptics who weren't at the
conference tweeted things along the lines of "Sounds like your conference is a
bunch of idealist hippies preaching to the choir…" A genuine concern, but
what's really exciting is that this definitely wasn't the case. It was
instead a bunch of realist technologists with the expertise and influence to
actively overcome barriers to improving the world.

Open Data is about social change and empowerment. It is about
accountability of organisations with massive influence over the lives of
ordinary people. It is not about an abandonment of personal privacy, or
everybody knowing everything about everyone else.

It should go without saying (yet it still needs to be said) that it is not
appropriate to blindly make all data available to everyone about every aspect
of everybody's life. But what if you had access to all of the data anyone
had ever collected about your life? Think about purchase history (shop
loyalty cards, travel tickets), online activities (searches, browsing history,
social networking). All this stuff is being stored anyway, all over the
place. Often by organisations who fully intend to profit from it, presumably
with your unwitting consent. They went to the trouble of collecting it, but
you went to the trouble of providing it. It's your data too. What could you
do with it (or hire a software developer to do with it)? Then imagine you had
access to the same data from everyone in your town, aggregated and anonymised,
and visualised in a nice way. Maybe you could team up with your neighbours
for cheaper bulk food purchases? Maybe you'd realise that others had similar
hobbies or problems nearby, and could form special interest or support groups?
Reduce costs by sharing transport to similar destinations (or just have some
company on the journey)?

There's so much potential within data that's already held.

The UK government's Midata initiative is a massive step in the right direction
[3] toward compelling commercial enterprises to hand over machine-readable
datasets to consumers upon request.

In Slovakia and Kenya (and possibly others, but these were the ones that came
up), there is a constitutional right to data held by the government. Not
without loopholes and other problems, of course [5, 2].

One of the obvious problems is convincing large organisations that hold lots
of data (like commercial enterprise and governments) of the circumstances in
which it would be in everybody's best interest to release (some of) it.
Reasons they don't include a lack of understanding of the benefits;
disproportionate assessment of risks; aversion to change; a lack of technical
expertise and infrastructure; "data hugging syndrome" [2]; licencing issues;
outdated business models.

Nigel Shadbolt's experience says that large organisations who open data
always see benefits. It's always worth the effort. When the data is there,
suddenly developers start doing things with it; applications appear, many
unexpected, and usually free. He stressed that it's important to have a
stockpile of success stories in case you need to convince someone in charge of
the value of Open Data, and his favourite one was the publication of MRSA
rates in hospitals (resulting in sharing of good practice, and an 85%
reduction in MRSA over two years). See a list at the end of this post for all
of the success stories I came across over the course of the two days.

There were lots of discussions about the users or audiences of Open Data, and
the various different roles people can have. Most consumers of Open Data are
developers, and 'ordinary people' see the data via an application. Many won't
know (or care) about the source of the data that powers the app, even if it
about them. Many will, and trust must be built for people see the value that
such apps could bring to their day to day lives. Ideally, releasing a dataset
would be part of an ecosystem, rather than a one-time thing. Data providers
should value consumer feedback, and commit to good quality, up-to-date data.
Rufus Pollock wonders why every dataset doesn't have a public issue tracker,
and notes that poor quality data creates wasted time, especially at hack
events [4].

A successful Open Data world needs partnership between the public, media and
organisations. All of these parties need educating on appropriate
combinations of the realistic potential of Open Data, and the technicalities
of releasing and using it. Michael Hörz [6] discussed the journalist
perspective on Open Data; they're desperate for data about everything, and
often manage to get hold of it. But they find themselves begging for
spreadsheets or CSV files, because what they get given are PDFs. Eugh! Yet
they're not asking for Linked Data formats? Which means, presumably, that
after they've been through the trouble of extracting data from PDFs, they're
putting it in a spreadsheet or something, and there's still a whole level of
usefulness missing. And I assume that's because they don't know otherwise, or
perhaps don't have the resources to learn even if they're aware of the
possibilities. Similar sorts of reasons that they're being given PDFs by
organisations in the first place.

So awareness, and easily digestable educational resources (how about
SchoolOfData.org) need to be promoted.

Now then, about those success stories... This list includes data publishing
projects, groups and apps that have been built on Open Data.

That'll do for now. Lots of the portals and competitions have links to app
examples etc. There's lots to explore.

Finally, I highlighted in my notes quite a lot of things that I need to find
out more about. A lot of them are technology or platforms for publishing or
sharing Open Data, and various standards or studies I need to read in more
detail.

I have a couple of questions to ponder on, too:

There's a massive focus around hacks (more often than not one off events) as a
way of using and promoting Open Data. What other ways are there? What will
the path to a deeper integration of Open Data in society look like?

There are lots of datasets and vocabularies about public services and society,
as well as science and education. What arts, culture and media datasets are
out there? (And what has been done with them?) Ooh, or online social
interactions? Maybe I'll do a survey.

Design is frustrating right now.

At the Future of Web Design conference earlier this month, I was inspired. As
a developer primarily and a designer when I have to be, the talks and people
at FOWD were perhaps more valuable to me than if my main focus was on design.
I don't need inspiration to develop, but I do to design.

But an incredibly busy week and a bit later, I find I haven't had an
opportunity to really make use of the ideas that were triggered at the
conference; not only that, but the inspiration is beginning to fade. And I
will struggle to find time to watch the talk videos over the next few weeks.

I had intended to shove together a new portfolio site, to match my shiny new
business cards, before the first day of FOWD. Naturally I didn't manage to
stick to this deadline, continued to work on the site during the conference,
and to this day the redesign remains unfinished at localhost/. It is so far
responsive up to iPad dimensions, but the design that I was initially
satisfied with has fallen out of my favour, so I'm struggling to finish. I've
been browsing collections of great web design, like
this one, as well as staring agonisingly at localhost/, hoping for
re-inspiration.

Turns out I dislike quite a few of the designs on that list. Some just have
too much blank space. Many go way overboard with the 'Web 2.0' look; glossy
buttons, excessive rounded corners, and the like. Pretty on first glance,
perhaps, but after seeing so many sites in the same style, you suddenly
realise the genericness of them all; they give an impression of designers who
forgot that the purposes of, or the companies behind the sites have their own
personalities and branding that can't be represented simply with shiny buttons
and background gradients.

I am currently a fan of textured backgrounds, and I'll confess I am currently
of the opinion that a text shadow automatically makes almost any header text
look better. I'm sure this will wear off, just like glossy buttons did. But
I'm still struggling to find a style that suits me personally (and matches my
business cards).

So far, just writing about it has helped a little, and I think I have enough
beginnings of new ideas to push on. Watch this space.
__